


Reconcile the Dark

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Crossover, Drama, Humor, M/M, Romance, burn the jacket Ed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-22
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-12-18 13:47:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11875803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Nothing puts a lifespan into perspective quite like the prospect of eternity.  Sometimes, some days, the universe is kind.  And sometimes its curators are very, very hot.[Crossover/AU!]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is for two of today's prompts at [Roy/Ed Week](http://royedweek.tumblr.com/post/162843446491/royed-week-is-coming-up-this-year-royed-week): Time Travel and Fandom Swap AU! ………translation: it's a Doctor Who AU.
> 
> There's more of it – lots more – but it's still writing itself into new and exciting corners, so I have no idea how much there will be eventually. XD I'm at a con next weekend ([hi!](http://tierfal.tumblr.com/post/164418192474/the-most-serious-cosplayer-you-know-is-headed-to)), but I might get a chance to throw another piece at you guys next Monday, and I'll see what I can do from there. XD …aaaaaand I ran out of time to post even more than I expected to, so if you spot any egregious typos, incomplete sentences, etc., please let me know so I can fix them later! ^^;
> 
> If you're not a Doctor Who aficionado, I tried to make it pretty accessible! All you really need to know is that anything that seems super cool and creative, I probably did not make up. :'D  If you _are_ a Doctor Who fan, I stopped watching after Series 5, so I'm afraid it likely won't be compliant with anything after that, though I tried to do my homework when writing this stupid thing left me time. XD The title is borrowed from the song in [an amazing fanvid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CraBIydn4u0) from Back In The Day which also doubles as a great trailer for RTD-era Doctor Who!
> 
> Two last things: One, this has pretty canon-consistent levels of violence and dark thematics, so I didn't warn for it with AO3's checkboxes, but please be aware! Two, I tagged pretty minimally, but even so, many of them don't come into play until much later. Plenty of suffering is yet to come! XD
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> _And I don’t want to break the heart_  
>  _Of any other man but you, but you, oh_  
>     
> – “Sinner’s Prayer” – Lady Gaga –
> 
>  
> 
>  

There are probably several more remarkably inconvenient occasions to recognize that one is in love than while surfacing from the breathless embrace of a frigid river, but Roy is distracted enough by the task of not-drowning that he can’t think of one.

Ed—drenched and dark gold and sputtering, starting to laugh on the tail end of a wet gasp—is a vision.

Roy—treading water, shaking his sopping hair out of his face, unable to look away even long enough to check whether they’re still being followed—is royally fucked.

That’s Ed’s phrase.  Most of Roy’s favorites are.

Ah, well.  Men have fallen headlong and heart-first for less, and no one with two eyes, red blood, and half a wit could blame him.

  


* * *

  


Roy met Ed for the first time on a Thursday afternoon.  He’d been sitting on a bench in one of the desperate-little-gasp-of-greenery attempts at something like a park that the regents had interspersed between the campus building, apparently in the hopes of giving them all something to stare at other than gray walls and blackboards.  In theory, it was a good idea.  In practice, every one of them was overrun with speeding bikes and/or students who collapsed on the grass at intervals and stopped moving.  If they stayed where they’d fallen for more than ten minutes without a twitch or a detectable breath, Roy would go over and nudge them with his foot; such were the responsibilities of the faculty, or something like that.  All in all, though, it was a decent place to do sudoku if you didn’t mind the occasional dead-student scare.

It was also, evidently, a decent place for someone to drop down next to you on your selected bench—which was engraved with the name of an alumni who had wanted to donate, but not _too_ much—and sling one leg up over the other at the knee.

“Hey,” the newcomer said.  “Is your hand okay?”

Roy had looked up at the intrusion, so he’d already met the startling tawny eyes by the time the dangerously reckless mouth admitted speech.  The hair was even worse; and what bone structure—Roy had half a mind to drag him over to the art department and give the figure classes the session of their lives.

He was, however, wearing the most unspeakably gaudy red leather jacket that Roy had ever seen in sartorially-themed nightmares.  Roy wasn’t sure whether that would be a blessing or a cataclysm for the art students, so perhaps it was better not to test their mettle just yet.

“I’m sorry,” Roy said, and he was—though not surprised.  It tended to be the case around here that the cute ones were strange.  “Do I know you?”

The young man stared at him.

Then the young man looked down at Roy’s newspaper, folded for efficient access to the sudoku grid.

“ _Shit_ ,” he said.  “I thought I—what day is it?”

“October eleventh,” Roy said.

“Thursday?” the young man asked.  At the beginning of Roy’s nod, he shoved a hand back into his bangs—cute, but stranger by the second—and gritted his teeth.  “ _Damn_ it.  That explains a lot.  Um… okay.  Uh… have a nice day.”

“Thank you,” Roy said.  “You, too.”

“’Kay,” the guy said, standing and tugging on the lapels of his cataclysmic jacket.  “See you.”

Roy bit his tongue on the response he always wanted to make to that, which was _How can you be so sure?_

But there was something—

Familiar.  There was something familiar about…

Well.  Hell.  There was something familiar about a lot of people when you scanned so many young faces in lectures halls every day that they blurred together at the edges.  Other than the standouts, students started to resemble one another an awful lot—and that was hardly his fault; pattern recognition was a critical element of human survival, after all.  Categorization of the universal data helped prevent it from burying you in details and smothering all of your higher faculties once and for all.

People were like sand that way.  And sand would suffocate you just as fast as you would drown in water, if you were at an equal depth in both.

It didn’t matter.  Unless that kid was one of the back-row lurkers in one of Roy’s classes after all, it wasn’t especially likely that they’d ever see each other again.

  


* * *

  


Or, of course, they would: barely twenty-six hours later, to be precise.  Roy had taken the shortcut around the back of the dining hall nearest to his lecture room, hoping to make a break for his car and escape—after distributing all of his paper prompts and ruining several dozen student weekends, that was.  If he was quick enough, none of them would catch him and try to scam him into offering them some free ambulatory office hours.

A scuffling noise drew his fickle attention sideways as he swung around the corner and started along the rear of the building.  He glanced over, and then he slowed his stride, and then he stopped—because that _had_ to be the same young man from yesterday, unless remarkably-bright, sexily-flowing, tantalizingly-silky-looking blond ponytails were suddenly becoming as common in real life as they were in Roy’s fantasies.

There was also the pertinent detail that the corporeal carnal dream in question was standing on his tiptoes, hands braced on a windowframe, peering through the foggy glass.

“Excuse me,” Roy said, because old habits died hard, and good manners died harder, apparently.

The kid glanced back and smiled at him sunnily—and completely blankly.  Since Roy had taken up civilization yesterday, he was liable to believe that crap.

“Hi,” the beautiful demon said before returning his attention to the window.

“You aren’t supposed to be back here,” Roy said.  “Who—”

“Hey, what day is it?” the fair-haired cretin asked before he could get another word in edgewise.

“Is that your catchphrase?” Roy asked.

“Huh?” the young man said.  He was still glued to the window.

“It’s Friday,” Roy said.  “October twelfth.  Which is, at least the last time I checked, the today that was schedule to follow yesterday, although I could be wrong.”

“Okay,” the guy muttered.  “We’ve got time.  Well—we can _make_ time.”  He laughed—a quick, slightly harsh trill of a thing—and started tilting his head from side to side like he was trying to get a better angle.  “That was a joke.”

“What in the world are you doing?” Roy managed, better late than never.  “Are you a student?”

“Sure,” the young man said.

Very convincing.  “Of what?”

“The human condition,” the young man said smoothly, though his attention to whatever was happening on the other side of the window never wavered.  “And physics, applied physics, astrophysics, theoretical physics, hyper-theoretical physics, aeronautics, astronomy, and literature.  But that shit’s hard.”  He waved Roy over, and—strange thing; strangest thing—Roy _went_.  His body moved for him like magnetized iron; he never had a choice.  “Does this look funny to you?”

There were several things about _this_ that looked funny according to a number of meanings of the word, but Roy didn’t suppose that this unexpected new campus plague was referring to any of the things that had caught Roy’s eye.  Especially not the one that had caught Roy’s eye the most, which was how absolutely, breathtakingly gorgeous the plague’s ass was.

Dutifully, Roy squinted through the window, trying to follow the direction that his unwillingly-accepted guide was pointing.

A variety of shadowy figures moved around inside.  Further squinting made it hazily evident that one of them appeared to have…

…a gun?

“This is a dining hall,” Roy said, perhaps a modicum stupidly.  “This is a _student_ establishment.”

“I know,” the odd young man next to him murmured.  “By now that sorta shit should be outlawed around here, right?”

Roy managed to tear his eyes away from the travesty long enough to stare at his companion again.  “What?”

“Never mind,” the young man said.  “Shouldn’t be pointing it around, in any case.  Wait, hang on—”

The shadowy figures were now, in typical shadowy figure style, skulking around and collecting what looked to be a series of large crates or boxes, which they were stacking near a doorway.  The one with the handgun appeared to think that the weapon was more or less interchangeable with a baton, and was gesturing with it heedlessly.

The blond beside him didn’t flinch—Roy checked.  That was interesting.

“Are they leaving?” the boy asked, pushing up further on his toes like another half an inch would offer a better vantage.  “We gotta get in there.”

“What?” Roy said—yet again.  This one seemed to have a talent for drawing it out of him.  “No, we most certainly do _not_ ; we’re going to call campus poli—”

“Okay,” the boy said.  “You call campus police, and I’ll figure out what the fuck’s going on.  That sounds good, actually.  Teamwork.”  He shrugged off the indefatigable obnoxious red leather jacket and started wrapping it around his hand.  “You got their number?”

Roy refused to be chagrined by a madman.  “I—do not.  But I have a 3G network, and what I do not have is a _death wish_ —what are you doing?”

“Getting answers,” the young man said.  “It’s… sorta my hobby, I guess.”  With his right hand swathed in red leather, decorative chains swinging freely, he nudged Roy aside with his elbow, took one pace away from the window, drew his arm back—

Roy was getting a bit slow in his… not _old_ age, obviously, but— “ _Don’t_ —!”

The boy punched through the window.

He _punched_ through the _window_ —

Shards of shattered glass burst outward like firework sparks; that only ever worked in _movies_ —

Roy had ducked instinctively away from the impact, throwing both arms over his face to shield it, but when he carefully raised his head, the young man was just… standing there.  He unwound the leather jacket from around his hand like nothing had happened, and no considerable property damage had just been dealt.

And despite the breakage, the ferocity of the blow, the spray of jagged edges—rips and nicks and shark-tooth tears marred the red leather for several inches down from where the bright-eyed hellion had smashed it through a windowpane—Roy couldn’t see a single drop of blood.  That couldn’t—there wasn’t—how in the world—

“Your—jacket,” he said, stupidly, since neither _Are you all right_ nor _What the hell is wrong with you_ seemed necessary or likely to garner a reply.

“S’fine,” the young man said.  “I’ve got a ton of ’em.”  He started shouldering the jacket in question back on, rising to his toes again to peek through the broken window.  He paused in threading his right arm through the sleeve to flick at a little piece of glass sticking to the bottom of the frame, sending it ricocheting inside, where it tinkled as it met its brethren on the floor.  “You coming?”

Roy had a more pertinent question: “Who the hell are you?”

The young man paused, blinked at him, and flashed a staggeringly winsome smile.  “I’m the Educator.”

“What?” Roy managed.  His dignity was slowly slipping away, never to be seen again.  Not once in his life had he repeated that word so many times within a quarter of an hour.

“Just call me Ed,” the young man said.  “Most people do.”

“Ed, then,” Roy said, and something… something about it tingled, faintly, on the edges of his tongue, like the first inklings of fine chocolate.

“Don’t wear it out,” Ed said.  He adjusted his abominable jacket, pulled the right sleeve down to cover his hand, and swiped glass dust and detritus off of the windowsill.

Which he then planted both hands on so that he could vault himself through the empty frame like it was _easy_.

He spun to look back once he was inside; Roy could hear the giant black boots—which had to be two sizes larger than his feet, proportionally speaking—crunching in the glass.

“C’mon,” he said.  “Trust me.”

Roy’s heart pounded.  He hadn’t felt this way in years—hadn’t felt this… what?  Startled?  Trepidatious?  _Excited_?

He cleared his throat.  He had to be rational here.  He couldn’t let the prospect of the thrill of it cloud his judgment; he couldn’t let the sheer gold-gleaming transcendence of Ed’s hair and eyes and grin blind him to reality.  Not here; not now; not ever.  He’d crawled through too much shit getting here to throw it away over a moment’s misjudgment.  “I don’t imagine the dean would smile on this sort of beha—”

“Fuck the dean,” Ed said.  “Is that what you’re worried about?”

“Well,” Roy said.  “That, and life and limb, and legality, and the simple fact that I don’t have the slightest idea who you a—”

“I already told you who I am,” Ed said.  “And relax—what the dean doesn’t know won’t hurt him, and he’ll know whatever we want him to know.”  He reached into a pocket in the lining of the jacket and withdrew a little leather wallet, which he flipped open to reveal an identification badge.

There wasn’t time to read much more than _Federal Bureau of Investigation_ before he snapped it closed.  Roy hadn’t finished gaping before he tipped it open again, distracting Roy with a broad wink—but this time, the ID said _Secret Service_ —

“What?” Roy choked out, rather faintly.

Damn it.  He’d been hoping not to have to say that again.

“Just get your ass in here,” Ed said.  “This is gonna be good.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long! :[ I was bouncing around between projects like ~~an idiot~~ I always do, and I didn't want to get too far ahead of myself. Which unfortunately is why I can't promise any kind of update schedule, but there will be more when I get my shit together! ^^;;

It was good.

That was the terrifying part.

It was the most fun Roy had had in as long as he could remember.

Not that there hadn’t been a handful—a rather large handful; possibly two generous cupped hands full—of moments of heart-stopping horror in the process, but unfortunately Roy’s psyche has twisted into so many convoluted knots over the years that that actually added to the fun.

The twisted psyche aspect was also the reason that he could believe that any of it had really taken place.  Ed, in his battered jacket, had strode in with broken glass scattering away from his heels and started opening crates.  Evidently they contained vast quantities of a smuggled—and highly unstable—element called chrysopium.  Roy had pointed out that such an element did not, in fact, exist; Ed, with his head halfway into one of the containers, had said only, “Maybe not in _your_ solar system.”

Clearly, none of it was happening in any recognizable reality, which freed Roy up to enjoy it as much as he liked without having to fret about concrete consequences.

And it was fantastic—it was a delightful change from the familiar dreams.  It was all swash and buckle and adrenaline; the chrysopium smugglers returned for their goods mere moments after Ed deduced that they’d taken advantage of Earth’s de facto interstellar trade neutrality because “this lot” hadn’t figured out lightspeed travel yet; the two of them wound up in a knockdown, drag-out fistfight with a couple of cronies whose appearances went fuzzy when you saw them out of the corner of your eye—

And it felt magnificent.  Roy was utterly, absolutely, unremittingly _free_ in this little fantasy.  He was free to give a grand total of zero shits about whether he hurt one of the smugglers—was it ‘Kevdal’ that Ed had said, as though that was a race or a species that should have registered with Roy?—and to deck them, trip them, pull one into a headlock and twist his arm back behind him until he screamed and dropped his gun—

It was dangerously exhilarating to be in danger—and to be in _control_.  Danger was one thing; danger came easy and thrashed you and disappeared again before you’d even blinked—but to be in the thick of it, with _power_ , affecting the hurricane even as the gusts picked up—

That was the drug.

And Roy _wanted_ it.

He’d even reveled in the part where the man—the Kevdal, apparently—in charge returned with guns literally blazing; Roy had never seen a weapon like that before, like something out of a futuristic movie; and Ed had hauled him away from the flunky he’d been swiftly subduing and made him raise his hands above his head to surrender.  They’d gotten locked up in a very chilly refrigerator room, handcuffed to a piece of shelving welded to the wall, and Roy had said, “Ordinarily, I am overwhelmingly in favor of light bondage, but in this particular instance—”, and Ed had said “Keep your pants on” and laboriously rolled up his sleeve.

Beneath the sleeve had been an arm—but not the kind that Roy expected.  Regular arms, ordinary arms, did not allow a focused-scowling, fair-haired, fiery-dispositioned young man to peel a rubbery layer of false skin away, reveal a complicated metal grille in place of the bones of a forearm, and withdraw a small cylindrical piece of metal from within it with the opposite hand.

Ed had said, “Sit tight,” and pressed a button on the object he’d retrieved, and there’d been a whirring noise—

The tip of the thing in his hand—which looked like some kind of an ungodly cross between a whiteboard marker, a presentation clicker, and a remote control—lit up lightning-blue, and he twirled it deftly to apply what appeared to be the business end to the closest handcuff.  The whirring ramped up to a rattling, and the chain between the cuffs jingled wildly, and the shelf began to shake—

And then there was a sharp click, and the handcuff fell open.

It took all of thirty seconds to duplicate, triplicate, and quadruplicate—if that was, in fact, a word—the tactic, and then Roy was rubbing his wrists and staring unabashedly at the one of Ed’s that consisted of wires and steel.

“Surprise,” Ed said, but there was something grim about the way that he was grinning.

“How is that possible?” Roy asked with some startlingly stubborn remnant of his voice.

“Welcome to the future, hot stuff,” Ed said.

“It’s Roy,” Roy said.  “But thank you.”

“I meant it ironically,” Ed said, hauling his sleeve down and whirling on one heel to start for the door.  “’Cause we’re in a fucking fridge and all.”

Roy had not gotten this far by failing to notice the telltale signs of a blush suffusing the cheeks of a beautiful young person, and he couldn’t help the extremely satisfied smirk that spread itself across his face.

Ed was pointing his science-magic wand at the lock on the refrigerator door now and muttering vigorously, however, so Roy sauntered in pursuit.

They crept back into the room they’d broken into before, where the smugglers were taking a break from what was evidently a busy schedule of dastardly derring-do in order to raid the student supplies and have a snack.  Ed’s eyes were distracting—their color, their intensity—and his mouth might have been the single most tempting specimen that Roy had ever seen.  He’d always meant to catalogue the worst offenders so that he’d have a metric when he needed one; now he couldn’t think of anything more descriptive to say than that Ed was a fifteen out of ten on a disaster scale, and Roy had always been weak for the type of people who embodied earthquakes.

Ed looked like there was nowhere on the planet that he’d rather be as he eyed their quarry and turned his strange device over in his even stranger hands.

“What is that?” Roy asked of the tool that had freed them.  He could smell a fight by now; he doubted there’d be time later, and adrenaline had a tendency to conspire with curiosity and grab him by the throat.

“Sonic screwdriver,” Ed said, as though that, too, should have been a regular feature of Roy’s vocabulary.  “You have a pretty good right hook.  You think you can hold off three at once while I get that chain off the freezer and try to wrap ’em up in it?”

Roy considered the Kevdals.  They still blurred at the edges every time he tried to focus on their shapes, which helped explain why they’d hit so much harder than they looked capable of.

Then he considered the crates.  Then he considered the small silver lighter that one of the Kevdals had just tossed down onto the table after starting a cigarette indoors—which was, for the record, a violation of half a dozen Earth laws in addition to whatever interstellar ones they’d broken.

“I have a question about chrysopium,” he said.

Ed’s eyes were on the Kevdal leader, who was using one hand to tap a message into something that looked like a touchscreen tablet while stuffing bread into his mouth with the other.  “Shoot.”

“Is it flammable?” Roy asked.

That snared Ed’s attention in a hurry, which might not have qualified as what most people would have called a ‘good sign’.

Ed grinned, broad and bright and seismic.

“Highly,” he said.  “And I like the way you think.”

“Thank you,” Roy said.

Ed zeroed in on the Kevdals again.  “I sure hope you don’t die.”

“Me, too,” Roy said.

He didn’t.

He did, however, sustain a very broad and remarkably painful slash across the entire palm of his right hand when one of the Kevdals, down his gun and also his eyebrows after a localized chrysopium explosion, pulled the glowing interstellar equivalent of a Bowie knife.  On the upside, the spray of blood as Roy steeled himself, curled his fist, and then applied it to the responsible party’s slightly singed face must have looked dreadfully exciting, and it made the knockout all the more enjoyable.

There wasn’t long to spend clutching his gushing hand in any case; Ed had made literally short work of the remaining Kevdal still standing after the blast, and then it was just a matter of hauling them all into range of the repurposed chain and using the screwdriver to pop the padlock.

“Shit-motherfucker,” Ed said, and he was peeling the jacket off again, the better to tear out a long strip of the lining and offer it to Roy.  “Put some pressure on it—this’ll just be a minute, and then we’ll get you fixed up, yeah?”

It was difficult to argue with people who didn’t leave you time to get a word in edgewise.

Ed had already moved on to snatching up the snarling Kevdal leader’s communication device, which had skittered underneath a table during the conflagration-confrontation.  Ed pointed the screwdriver at it, which appeared to be his solution for just about everything; the whirring went on for a few seconds, and then the screen lit up, and he tucked the screwdriver back into the gap in his forearm and applied one fingertip to the task of tapping away.

“Cool,” he said after a moment, tossing the tablet aside like a used wrapper and starting back towards Roy.  “Cops’re coming.”

Roy wanted to gesture towards their chained-up charges, but any sudden movements were likely to fling more blood all over the room.  “What the hell kind of cops will know how to deal with this?”

“Judoon,” Ed said.  “Bunch of thugs, mostly, but they’ll take care of this.  They like that kind of thing.  Here, c’mon, I don’t want you passing out on me after all that.”  He hesitated—just long enough to falter for one step on his way across the room to Roy, but it was enough to notice.  “Let me… you want it way tighter than that.”

“I know,” Roy said.  Deployment taught you a lot of things that the recruitment brochures didn’t mention.  “It’s a bit of a challenge with one hand.”

Ed, who had just gripped the two ends of the makeshift bandage, glanced up at him, eyebrow arching, and lifted the elbow of the arm made of metal.

“Lots of shit is,” he said.

Roy started to wince, and then continued in earnest—although for a different cause—as Ed hauled hard on the knot.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and then “Thank you,” and then “The hospital on the medical school campus—”

“You can’t take this to any old joint,” Ed said, apparently satisfied with the bandage.  He threw the remains of the leather jacket over his right shoulder—which half-concealed his arm—and waved Roy along after him as he started for the door.  “These assholes lace their weapons with all kinds of stuff you don’t want to waltz with, and the instruments in this era won’t even be able to detect it.  It’s fine, though—I got you.  Trust me.”

Even accounting for the deep, bleeding, persistently-throbbing hand wound, this was the nicest dream Roy had had in a long, long time.

“All right,” he said, and followed.

Ed led him just across the closest street bordering campus, at which point he directed them towards a relatively classy-looking, albeit incredibly tiny, tattoo parlor.  The narrow façade, which a very questionable architect with a loose grasp of fire codes had somehow crammed into a gap between two storefronts no larger than an alleyway would have been, read _Al’s Empowerment Emporium: Inkings, Jewelry, & Accoutrements_ in flowing white letters on crisp black paint.  The door was rimmed in powder-blue, and there were forget-me-nots in the windowbox.

Roy hesitated.  Something about this wasn’t… right.

“How have I—” He cleared his throat and stalled his stride.  “I’ve never noticed this place before.  It’s very… unique, but I’ve never—”

“C’mon in,” Ed said, heading for the door.  He opened it, held in, and gestured for Roy to enter.  Roy crept forward, slowly, uncertainly, bolstered only by the knowledge that Ed hadn’t steered him into certain death just yet, and stepped inside… “It was the coolest thing I could get him to look like,” Ed was saying.  “I had to beg even for this.  He’s real prissy that way.”  The door smacked shut against Ed, _hard_ —hard enough to send him staggering forward, clutching at his back.  “Shit, _ow_!  Okay, okay, I’m sorry!”

It was—

Physically impossible.  It had fit into an alleyway; it _had_ ; he’d just seen it—

He wanted to step back outside to verify his own recollection, but his feet were rooted to the grating on the floor.  He stared—up, back, around himself.  They were in what had to be an engine room, half again as big as physics should have permitted.  There was some sort of a center console rising in the middle of it, gunmetal gray with a shaft down the center where pale white steam writhed restlessly; the hexagonal spread of operational plates around it was dotted with buttons and dials and joysticks and a lever that looked like it might once have been an emergency brake; there was a pinwheel tucked into a transparent cylinder, and two small rubber-rimmed screens on the side further from the door, which for just a moment glowed dark red—like a pair of eyes.

“What do you think?” Ed asked calmly, striding over to hang his shredded jacket from the lever, which didn’t budge.

“I have no idea,” Roy said faintly.  “Does it matter?”

“Nope,” Ed said.  “Hang on—here.”

He reached down and hooked his fingers into the holes in the silver floor grating just to Roy’s left, jerked once, and lifted it free.  He set it aside, knelt next to the crevice, and reached up.

“Give me your hand,” he said.

Roy could hardly be blamed for hesitating, but the trepidation—

Swelled, peaked, and then melted as Ed started to smile.

How goddamn cheesy was _that_?

Fortunately, his poker face would preserve his dignity; Ed would only be able to see him weighing his options and then gingerly offering his still sluggishly-bleeding palm down to the single unlikeliest of all of these implausibilities.

Ed caught his wrist gently in deft, clever fingers.

And then yanked on his arm.

And then shoved his hand into the gap, muttered, “C’mon, guys,” and—

Somehow summoned a swirling rush of tiny gold— _things_ , minuscule particles lit from within, like a cross between fireflies and fireworks; they rose in a sweeping stream and clustered around Roy’s hand as Ed unwrapped the fabric tied across his palm—

And his skin tingled, bright and odd but not painful—like—Pop Rocks?  Like Pop Rocks on his nerve endings; like carbonated soda fizzing everywhere beneath his skin—

Then they retreated just as suddenly as they’d appeared—spiraling back down into the shadowed depths beneath the floor, leaving him with…

A hand crusted with blood but utterly healed—sealed up right along the gash, with nothing but the thinnest, slightest white scar remaining where the open wound had bisected his palm.  He flexed his fingers once; dried blood flaked away, but the tiny pale line held firm.

Just a touch belatedly, perhaps, Ed released his hand.

“Nanogenes,” Ed said.  “Worth tanglin’ with the Chula every now and again just to steal a few.”

“That’s impossible,” Roy’s idiot voice said.

Ed grinned.  “The good shit usually is.”

The discarded lining-bandage monstrosity had ended up on the grate just in front of Roy’s toes.  He knelt to retrieve it and then wasn’t sure what to do with it, and discovered that he couldn’t ruminate on his options and stand up without banging his head against the console at the same time, so he favored the latter.  “Is there a…?”

“Oh, yeah,” Ed said.  “Just don’t throw it in anything that _looks_ like a trashcan, or he’ll hit you with doors.”

Roy paused, tried to parse that, failed, and attempted to approach a different part of it sideways.  “‘He’?”

“Yeah,” Ed said.  “Al.  The ship.”  He gestured in a way that appeared to be encouraging Roy to follow him, and then in a way that seemed to indicate their surroundings on the whole.  “Like it says on the front.”

Roy…

…gave up.

And trailed Ed through an arched doorway lined with little blinking yellow lights, into a room that looked like an independent thrift store on methamphetamine.

Ed swanned right into the midst of the sartorial chaos—he’d caught up his mangled jacket on their way, but now he tossed it into a frosted white storage bin to the side, the better to beeline over to a rack of fifty obnoxious red leather jackets identical to the one he’d just abandoned.

“Hot Topic goes out of business in 2050,” he said, jackknifing one off of the hanger and shouldering it on.  “Prepare for that.”

“Thank you,” Roy said, because his obscenely vast vocabulary and relatively impressive intellect couldn’t conjure a single other option.

“Well,” Ed said, tugging on his lapels to settle the jacket, “anything you’re dying to see while you’ve got Al at your disposal, or do you just wanna get back to your life and all that?”

Roy blinked.  “What… do you mean?”

Ed waved his hand around them.  “He’s a—shit, what do you guys call it?  A spaceship.”

Roy stared.

Ed snapped the fingers of his left hand and then pointed the first one at Roy.  “Time machine.  That’s the one I was thinking of.”

Something in the pit of Roy’s stomach had coiled itself into a tight, thudding knot.  It had been so long since he’d felt anything like this that he couldn’t tell whether it was pleasant anticipation or something more akin to fear.

“That’s all right,” he said.  “I’ll just… be going.”

Something shifted in Ed’s remarkable eyes.  It might have been disappointment—flaring first, and then shuttered away.

“Okay,” Ed said.  “I appreciate the help.  You were pretty good out there.”

“You were phenomenal,” Roy said, because it was the truth, and this was a dream.  He started back the way they’d come, assuming the door would materialize in front of him at some point.  Time to let it go.  All things came to an end, after all; and if you wanted the terrors to leave you alone, you had to relinquish the good things, too.

“’Bye, Roy,” Ed said when Roy put his hand on the door.

Roy shouldn’t have looked back, but he wanted to cement the image in his mind—Ed, hair mussed, eyes bright, hands shoved into his pockets, in a new leather jacket, with a half-smile that seemed far too familiar.

“See you around,” he said.

“Sure,” Ed said.  “Maybe.”

Roy breathed out, pushed the door open, and stepped through.  It fell shut behind him without a sound, and he looked up at the front of the little not-a-tattoo-shop for a moment both too long and not nearly long enough before he turned and walked away.

  


* * *

  


Riza had been better than he deserved from the very beginning.  Frequently he wondered why—and, almost as frequently, it occurred to him that he must have been offering her something in return that was tantamount in some way to what she offered him, because she was too smart to waste her energy on a time sink.

She’d created and set aside a Monday afternoon appointment slot for him, and she charged him significantly less than any of her other regulars—as far as he knew, anyway; the hourly rate she ran him was unreasonably low for psychiatry, and at some point in the process, they had silently agreed to pretend not to notice.  Accordingly, he’d never asked her what clients who couldn’t claim the Ex-Commanding Officer Discount had to pay.

He honestly tried to stay focused—discount or no, it wasn’t as though this time was cheap; and, more than that, it wasn’t as though it wasn’t a highlight of the week, both for seeing her and for the relief—while they talked through the usual business, and he swore up and down that he’d been keeping up with his mindfulness exercises and his meditative breathing, sharpening all of the little weapons in the larger war.  He’d sat with his back turned to his office door for a full hour last Wednesday before he had to swivel his chair around again, when the shaking got to be too much.  He’d only bled out in the desert twice in dreams this week.

“All of that sounds like progress,” she said, resting her elbow on the arm of her chair and her chin on her hand.  Her eyebrows arched up before her thin smile mirrored them.  “So what’s the distraction?”

A rather insipid, and yet apparently inextricable, part of him was always tempted to play dumb, coy, or both.

He steamrolled it.

“I’m going to ask you a strange question,” he said.  “Tell me the truth?”

“I’ll do my best,” she said, and the smile tilted slightly.

He held out his right hand.  “What do you see?”

She made sure to give him the dubious look in advance, just in case, before she directed her attention to his palm.

She paused.

She leaned forward.

She took his hand in both of hers and frowned down at it.

“This wasn’t here last week,” she said.  Her eyes flicked up to his face, although her question sounded so much like a statement that it hardly needed confirmation.  “Was it?”

“No,” he said.

“It looks like it was deep,” she said, one fingertip hovering just above the scar.  “But it healed—even.  And impossibly fast; impossibly clean, like—”

“Magic?” he asked.

Her eyes met his again, but this time the acidity of her gaze almost bowled him over.

“Very funny,” she said.

“I wish it was,” he said.

“I don’t believe in magic, Roy,” she said.  “And neither do you.”

“You’re right,” he said.  “But if you’re seeing it, and I’m seeing it, that means it had to have happened.  And if that’s true, then… hell.  I don’t know what else is.”

Now her eyes were narrowing, and her grip on his hand had begun to tighten, and here they went—

“What happened, Roy?” she said.

They’d made a pact, when they were children, that they’d tell each other everything, and they’d never, ever lie.

So he told her the story from the start.

  


* * *

  


The Saturday after that was the sort of beautiful, brisk fall day that normally eluded them in this climate.  Roy had learned to take advantage of life’s little pleasures, fleeting as the bastards were; he’d parked himself at an outdoor table at his favorite coffee shop café to do his grading.  Sometimes a pleasant place could mitigate a less-than-pleasant task.

A flash of movement drew his eye upward.  He hardly had time to lower the essay he’d been marking and jolt in startled recognition before Ed was clambering over the back side of the empty chair opposite him like a rather desperate lemur and folding himself into it, looking over his shoulder all the while.  “Hi, I’m Ed; I promise I don’t bite.  I’ll pay for your coffee if you act like I’m supposed to be here for five mi…” He turned his head at last and blinked owlishly—very animalistic all around today—at Roy.  “Holy shit.”

“I’ve already paid for the coffee,” Roy said, “but thank you.”  He reached into his bag, rustled the contents around until he found yesterday’s newspaper sudoku, and offered it across the table.  “Unfold it; it’s better coverage than anything else I’ve got.”

“You are a fucking miracle,” Ed said, shrugging out of the leather jacket, hurling it under the table, and hauling the hood of his black sweatshirt up over his hair.

“I’m not sure about that,” Roy said, “but thank you, I sup—”

Footfalls pounded around the streetcorner, and Ed snapped the newspaper up, burying his face in it.  Roy watched, dumbfounded, as a troop of apparently sentient rhinoceroses in what looked like riot gear stampeded past his little table, rustling his stack of essays with the heedlessness of their passage, and then disappeared on down the road.

“I just saw that,” he said.  “Didn’t I?”

“Told you about them,” Ed said, peeking around the side of the newspaper and then gingerly setting it down.  “Judoon.  Bunch of assholes.  All I did was liberate a prisoner who shouldn’t’ve been locked up anyway.  That’s the problem with having a sorta-kinda intergalactic police force that’ll immediately side with the highest bidder.”

“ _That’s_ who you called for the Kevdals?” Roy asked.

He really had just said that word out loud, without air-quotes.  Ed really was sitting in front of him, at least as far as his senses could be believed.

“Given the smuggling bit,” Ed said, “probably there was a lot of money in it for them from the Kevdalu government, and I figured we had to get your hand handled, so…”

He shrugged.

Then he paused.

Then he started scowling.

“I never meet anybody twice,” he said, peering at Roy.  “What’s wrong with you?”

“I beg your pardon,” Roy said.

“Other than the fact that your speech patterns are from the wrong era, I mean,” Ed said.  “That can’t be it.”  He rocked back in the chair, folding his arms across his chest, and frowned deeper still.  “Al must like you.  Why would Al like you?  What’d you do?  Did you bribe him?”

“Not that I recall,” Roy said, “but I’ve been told I’m irresis—”

“Or unless you’re stuck out of time,” Ed said.  He leaned in again, far too close across the tiny little table, but if Roy leaned back, he’d lose ground.  It wasn’t an unpleasant compromise, but it did make it _very_ difficult to resist the urge to kiss Ed’s mouth to stem the flow of nonsense.  “You’re a professor at the school, right?  How long’ve you been teaching there, exactly?  Do your students actually look _at_ you, or does it seem like maybe they’re lookin’ at something past you most of the time?”

“Since the year 2012,” Roy said.  “They look me directly in the eyes, or at least look directly at my collarbones, and some of them doodle me in their notebooks and turn adorable colors when I compliment their skill.  Are you asking me if I’m a ghost?”

“Well, I was,” Ed said, scowling at him even more intently.  “Not anymore.  There’s something… Why’d you start this whole teacher gig, anyway?”

Roy supposed there was no harm in being overly honest with an extremely detailed figment of his tormented imagination.  “Because my life was hollow and meaningless after the war,” he said, “and I had to find something to take my mind off of everything that I’d become.  At least here, occasionally, I can get through to some of them—and I try to believe that if I do that enough times, just as a matter of the law of averages, one of them will go out there and make a difference.”

Ed titled his head to the side—just slightly, like a puppy trying to figure out if that thing in your fingertips was a treat or not.

“Huh,” he said.  “Which war?”

“Iraq,” Roy said.

“Not familiar,” Ed said.  “Guess maybe you’ll have to fill me in.”

Roy blinked.  Did that—

Ed shoved his chair back, stood, and folded the newspaper again.  His hand was… covered, like it had been the first time Roy had seen it; this close, and focused, Roy could see that there was something unusual about the skin, because it didn’t wrinkle, and there weren’t any hairs, and the fingernails were all too uniformly even—

Ed was using it to hold the newspaper out to him.

“Thanks for this,” Ed said.  “You wanna help me bring a princess back to her home planet?”

Roy could have said a lot of things.

He could have said _What the hell are you talking about?_

He could have said _Even after the rhinoceros police, that is too much gibberish for me to believe_.

He could have said _What we did last week—that is the most alive I have felt in so long that when I walked past that building again and saw that the window was still broken, I cried_.

And there was a chance of the rhinoceroses coming back, wasn’t there, if they weren’t quick?

So he picked the simplest answer:

“Yes,” he said.

Ed grinned like a whole galaxy full of stars.

  


* * *

  


There are a hundred billion unimaginable places in the universe.  Roy always daydreamed of the ones he’d make it to someday—some mythical tomorrow when he had the money stacked up, and the time carved out, and the will, and the inclination, and the organizational impetus.  _Someday_ he’d see Paris; _someday_ he’d go to Niagara Falls.  _Someday_ , Hạ Long Bay; _someday_ , Giza; _someday_ —

Someday, he’d sleep through the night.  Someday, dragging his body out of bed would feel more like a blessing and less like a meaningless, self-flagellating trial.  Someday, the cinema wouldn’t be too loud; someday, the engine noise in an airplane wouldn’t make him grip the armrests until his knuckles ached; someday, his heart-rate wouldn’t skyrocket at the slam of a door.  Someday, he _could_ travel; _could_ stay in hotel rooms he hadn’t yet seen; _could_ wake up alone and not feel like the dark was strangling him, smothering him, thrusting its poison into his lungs and exploding him from the inside out—

He’d clung to the possibility, but a part of him had always known it was procrastination.  A part of him had always known that you had to stand up and _start_ to face the music; it wouldn’t just turn up on your doorstep when you least expected.

But Ed does.

Ed does, over and over and over again.

Ed takes him to cities where every tower’s made of glass.  Ed takes him to waterfalls that run upside-down.  Ed takes him to places he couldn’t have dreamed of if he’d had a thousand years and an unlimited supply of LSD, and Ed teaches him how to _save_ the people that they find there.  Some of them look like humans; some are unrecognizable; some are grateful; some try to murder them; some have fins or claws or fangs or bleed in strange colors, but bleed they do, and that much Roy can always understand.


End file.
